After the release Thursday of a scathing report on a Liberal multicultural outreach strategy, Premier Christy Clark said the only reason her opponents have a report from which to quote is because she asked for an investigation.

VICTORIA - The plan to use public money to help the B.C. Liberal party raise support in ethnic communities was launched from Premier Christy Clark’s own office, backed up by members of her inner circle.

So says the report of a two-week-long investigation into the proposed multicultural strategic outreach plan, conducted by four senior deputy ministers and released Thursday in the provincial capital.

Ground zero for the strategy was a meeting convened by Clark’s deputy chief of staff Kim Haakstad on Dec. 1 of 2011, and attended by public servants, political staff and a representative of the B.C. Liberal party.

The intention was “to capture current activities of the attendees related to multiculturalism,” and to “bring better coordination” among government, the caucus of Liberal MLAs and the party itself.

From the outset, the proceedings were compromised by a mixing of public interest and private partisan political interests, say the four deputies.

“At this meeting, confidential information was shared with invited members of government caucus and with a party staff person. The brainstorming that occurred at that meeting found its way into a partisan document that was then freely shared between government employees and caucus and party members. Both of these activities were clearly inappropriate.”

Now stop to consider the originators of this dubious strategy. Haakstad is a longtime supporter, friend and confidant of the premier’s, as fully attuned as anyone to Clark’s heavily partisan way of doing business.

Others in attendance included Pamela Martin, the former broadcaster who backed Clark for the leadership, then was rewarded with the post of her director of outreach; and Lorne Mayencourt, another Clark leadership supporter then serving time in a Clark-created sinecure.

But the key player in the meeting would appear to have been Brian Bonney, a government communications director and a former business leader who’d backed Clark for the party leadership.

“I decided Christy Clark was the person I had to support,” he told reporter Brent Richter of Burnaby Now in early 2011, “and I don’t do anything small so I went out and did it in a big way.”

Installed in a public service communications posting later that year, Bonney was well positioned to serve as Haakstad’s point man on the party-boosting ethnic outreach plan, and he proceeded to do just that.

The deputies reckon he spent up to half of his time on party work, even as he collected $124,000 in public funds in two communications postings in the public service.

They caught him forwarding more than 1,000 messages to his personal email accounts, pulling together lists of contacts from the ethnic community, bypassing ministerial chains of command, and running a secretive recruiting operation for consultants who would then serve as liaisons to the designated ethnic communities, all the while telling the would-be recruits never to let on that they even knew him.

The backchannel was critical because, as Liberal MLA (and briefly minister for multiculturalism) John Yap confessed to the investigators, it allowed the team to avoid public scrutiny under the provincial access to information law.

One of Bonney’s associates in the recruiting drive commented via email about the critical importance of keeping the operation under wraps: “It is absolutely critical that we do not leave any evidence of us helping them through this application.”

That brought another telling response from Yap: “I appreciate your efforts. Great job. Let’s now hope for the best.”

So, to summarize, one Liberal staffer calls for a coverup and the minister fires back with an attaboy.

The four deputies, led by head of public service John Dyble, appear to have dug up as much information as they could in relatively short order, while leaving open further avenues of inquiry by the independent watchdogs on access to information and provincial finances.

Full credit to them as well for laying this shabby affair on the premier’s doorstep, much as Christy Clark would have preferred to see the blamelines run in any direction but her own.

Trying to put the best face on the findings in the legislature Thursday, the premier claimed “the reason that members of the Opposition and any member of the public has a report from which to quote is because ... I asked the head of the civil service to review it.”

Pure guff.

The reason for the report is because somebody leaked a draft of the strategy to the New Democrats. Nor was Clark all that quick in her drive to get to the bottom of it.

Two days after the Opposition blew the whistle, she was still insisting that any mixing of public money and partisan interests “didn’t happen in this case” and the whole thing was a product of “somebody way down the chain.”

Both claims have now been refuted by her own officials.

Haakstad resigned two weeks ago. Bonney left earlier and the party has now agreed to repay half of his salary. Another staffer implicated in the report resigned Thursday. Other discipline should follow.

But the culture of crass, partisan evasion remains very much on display in the Clark administration, starting with the person at the very top of the chain.

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